jQuery Slider Shock – Custom Premium Sliders

A while back, I wrote about WP Theme Generator, a website where you could design and download your own WordPress theme in minutes. Now, the people behind that site have come up with a new creation for creating sliders, under the same premise of designing the slider right on their site and seeing it come together. It’s called jQuery Slider Shock.

Pre-built themes

On the site’s front page, there are sixteen pre-built themes that you can click on to preview them. I initially thought you would have been able to then either use those demos as they are, or pre-load the options into the editor to modify it for your needs. It doesn’t appear that you can do that, so that’s a shame, but it at least gives you an idea of the different things you can do.

Editing your slider

Once you’re ready to start playing with the editor, you can click the Build Your Own button and start tinkering. There’s an awful lot of options, enabling you to configure every minute detail of the slider. You can perceive that one of two ways: it’s great for control freaks and for people who are very particular about how they want their site to look, but it could be a bit overwhelming for someone looking to put together a quick slider.

You can pretty much edit every single aspect of the slider, including:

Background pattern

Timing and effects

Size, margins and caption location

The frame and the arrows

Colors for the background, titles and content

Different fonts for each element

Choose from specific size, or responsive size

The slider content

You can also choose where the slider get its content from, including from a particular category, taxonomy, or post type, as well as external feeds, such as YouTube, Flickr, Instagram or Twitter. This is a somewhat unique feature, which can help you showcase your work from places other than your own site. If you select a particular taxonomy, category or post type, you just set the featured image on each post, and that will be the image used in the slider. You can then go on to specify what should be used for the caption, including the title, description, author and date.

Integrating with WordPress

The slider can be called upon with either a shortcode, for putting it in posts, pages and widgets, or by a JavaScript code, for inserting it directly into your theme.

The slider comes with documentation to help you get it to do what you need it to. If you have no joy with that, you can always get in touch with the developers for support.

Pricing

The developers have gone for a freemium model with jQuery Slider Shock, meaning you are welcome to download a free version for personal use, but it has certain limitations, such as limited effects and skins, and the inability to use the external sources in the slider. However, for a good number of people, I’m betting that the free version will serve them well enough.

Beyond that, you have the option of licensing the slider, to unlock all of the features. The prices range from $19 for a single site, to $99 for a developer license. The prices really are quite reasonable and the WYSIWYG editor is really nice for people who don’t want to spend the time editing a slider themselves to get these highly customized sliders.

Dave, I guess I’m a bit like April, and paranoid about kiddie programmers who try to sell stuff, so my question is – what is the background of the developers of jquery slider shock, and how does it compare to other sliders like nivo?

I haven’t reviewed the code myself, but these guys have been around for a while. Like I said, they’re also behind the WP Theme Generator, so they’ve got a decent background with WordPress. And they also seem very responsive when issues arise. I guess you can always try them out with the free version to see how well it works for you, before upgrading to the paid versions if you need.

Few weeks back I was searching for a good featured post slider for one of my blogs. Before that I was using a free one but it was not seo optimized, it didn’t fetched the alt tag associated with the post images.
I hope this one is going to be good.

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